In mid-October last year, a motorhome user made a macabre discovery in the Casasola reservoir, in the town of Almogía (4,269 inhabitants), very close to the city of Málaga. It was a sack inside which the body of a person was found with zip ties on the hands and cement blocks to sink it. Those who did it had achieved their purpose, but the summer left the reservoir at very low levels, which is why it became visible. This then triggered a police investigation aimed at identifying the corpse and solving what clearly pointed to being a murder. His tattoos allowed the first and the few clues found the second, linked to a settling of scores related to drug trafficking. Three people have been arrested by the National Police, two men as material perpetrators and a woman as an accomplice. All are in prison.
The police work has made it possible to reconstruct what happened since, on May 12 last year, a woman reported the disappearance of her partner, a 31-year-old Albanian man, with whom she lived in the town of Benahavís “with a high standard of living,” according to the National Police. She said she had lost track of him under strange circumstances after having lunch together in a restaurant in Marbella. Then he had received a call from some acquaintances to meet at a sale located in the Málaga neighborhood of Puerto de la Torre. It was the last time she saw him. The investigation has revealed that he got into a car there with the two people who had summoned him and that they headed towards the area of the Casasola reservoir. He did not know it then, but it was a deception to kill him as a settling of scores within the framework of international drug trafficking.
The agents’ investigations intersected with that suspicious sack that a traveler had found in the reservoir area five months later, last October 14. When they opened it, they found a corpse in a state of saponification, a process in which body fat turns into a waxy substance similar to soap by the action of water and bacteria, which preserves the body but makes it unrecognizable. That his hands were tied with zip ties and that there were concrete blocks inside revealed that someone had not only killed that person but also wanted to hide the corpse at the bottom of the reservoir.
Despite the state of the body, some tattoos could be made out. This, together with the clothes he was wearing — according to what his partner had said — and also the DNA results, allowed identification and knowing that it was the young Albanian whose disappearance had been reported months earlier by the woman, who had suffered threats from a criminal organization to stop the search. The autopsy also showed the violence he had suffered and that had caused his death.
The only clue the agents had was the car the victim had gotten into when he was in the Puerto de la Torre neighborhood and that was captured by the area’s security cameras. The vehicle had been rented by a 58-year-old woman in Barcelona. And her trail indicated that she had been lurking in the area where the young missing man was later lost. The investigation confirmed that two men, also Albanians, aged 36 and 45, were traveling in it, who had traveled from Barcelona to Málaga to commit the crime. According to the National Police, they deceived the deceased to close an alleged drug sale, but in reality, they only wanted to kill him due to a settling of scores from a previous operation.
Both the woman who rented the car and the two alleged material perpetrators of the murder were arrested last February, but it was not until this Wednesday that the National Police made the case public once the judicial secrecy of the proceedings was lifted. All three have been sent to prison. The operation also included searches in the Barcelona towns of Vallirana and Vilafranca del Penedès, which allowed the seizure of several replica weapons, several mobile phones, and relevant documentation for the case.
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